I’ve stayed away from politics on this site, the main reason is I figure the surest way to offend visitors is politically, these days so many people seem so starkly divided into one political camp or the other, that it seems very easy to step on peoples political sensibilities. I am, however going to talk about politics, but mainly in the general sense to illustrate something I’ve thought about for quite a while and something that is grossly absent in most news coverage of polls and elections. With all science there are assumptions, things that you “assume” to be true so you can proceed with evaluating everything. In the science of polling, the words Sampling and turnout are quite relevant. (What?) In regards to polls, sampling is deciding what the makeup of your poll sample is, (percentage makeup by party affiliation) and trying to match that to expected turnout. But how do you predict turnout? Let’s take the following example of cartoonia….
Tag: support
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ftp access problems with lulu.com
As I’ve mentioned, in the last week, I’ve released a CD through lulu.com and I’ve also done a calendar, one of the frustrations I’ve had was the inability to do an ftpupload. My username and password were continually rejected. Well, after contacting support and being told someone would be back in touch with me in a few days, I just figured out the issue. I had a character in my password (#) that they didn’t like, I changed my password to something without the # sign and was immediately able to log in. So, IF you’re trying to ftp into ftpupload.lulu.com and are sure you have the login/password right, but still are being denied try changing to a password that JUST has a mix of numbers and letters (preferrably a good mix of upper/lower case as well.)
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Lightscribe writing under linux
Lacie has released a tool to write the back of cds using HP’s lightscribe technology under linux. I seem to recall there being a possibility of future support in k3b, but I don’t think that has been done yet. From what I remember about lightscribe is that it would require that you buy specially made cds that support being written using lightscribe. They were a bit more expensive than a standard cdr, but it is an impressive effect.
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Ubuntu Edgy Eft 6.10 out…
The newest Ubuntu (K/X/Edu as well) is out, Edgy Eft 6.10 is finalized and will be supported for 18 months. (Longer support/users seeking stable proven base should stick with Dapper Drake…) One of the biggest changes I can see from reports is the init process replacement. It sounds like they’ve yielded some good bootup improvements and I’m looking forward to downloading and trying it out. I found it interesting to see that the plan for the 7.04 release of Ubuntu is to include native support for Autopackage which is another approach to making “just any” old program trivial to install on any linux variant.
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Booting from CD when a systems BIOS won’t let you
Along the way on my permissions nightmare last night, I made matters worse by changing permissions on a fairly important file. In order to fix that I was going to need to reboot from a boot disk. The only problem was boot floppys typically don’t come with reiserfs support (only the boot cds I’ve found have that.) AND my server has for some time refused to boot from the CD. Now, the BIOS will let you choose CD as the first boot device but it promptly decides that there is a “BIOS checksum mismatch” and reloads the defaults which leaves you booting from floppy, then hard drive…. Now, I’ve changed the CMOS battery twice within a 2 month span and I think the longest things lasted were about a week before it reverted to that “BIOS checksum mismatch” (For those of you smart enough to suggest I replace the CMOS battery.) Now, it could be that the battery I replaced with had expiired it’s shelf life already I suppose. But….
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More linux software raid fun
OK, I know there are probably quite a few looking at this thinking…. “Hello where has he been?” when I’m talking about playing around with software raid under ubuntu linux, but…. in spite of all I’ve done supporting desktop systems and even small business servers I’ve never had an opportunity to setup a raid array. First it was because “you don’t want to do software raid” and I didn’t have a card to support hardware raid, then when I first was seeing people raving about how good linux software raid is, I didn’t have two free drives of equal size to work with. Well, the other day in working towards a storage system for a client I’ve got an ubuntu system (dapper 6.06.1) setup with software raid and wanted to poke and prod and test some things out before it goes into a useful role.
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Audio on Linux weekend…
For most people here in the US, this last weekend was known as Labor Day weekend, for me though… it was more like Audio on Linux weekend. I’ve mentioned before that I use my computer for most EVERYTHING and that’s not far off…. I have watched movies on the PC, I’ve recorded multitrack audio, captured tv shows to disc, and of course, work…. database server, digitial photos/editing, test web sites, word documents, test various hardware, etc. etc. test software, etc…. vmware…. oh the list could keep going and going and going…. Well, sometimes it seems that optimizing the machine for one thing comes at the expense of another. Since I had to swap out the system board on the main machine (massively failing probably due to overheating…. multiple pci slots had failed, etc….) I hadn’t had a chance to see why some things didn’t work the way I used to….
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New Docsis 3.0 standard to allow for 160Mbps+
The new Docsis 3.0 standard has been finalized and it allows for 160Mbps or more downstream and 120Mbps upstream. It also will support IPv6. Of course, in order to support those speeds cable system hardware will need to be upgraded (and cable modems…) so don’t expect those speeds next month. But, perhaps by ~2008?
Our local cable just started advertising 10Mbps as their fastest speed (previous was 5Mbps). I’d personally love to see those upstream speeds upped as well.
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HDR – High Dynamic Range – Images under linux
HDR – recently I heard someone talking about this with regards to digital imaging. The idea is that you have three identical images (landscapes) taken from a stationary (tripod) camera. The only difference is the exposure times vary. Together you can blend them to create a more impressive final picture. Yes, I just talked about fake photos and digital imaging. This, to me, is in a different class of photo editing…. enhancement(?) – well… anyway. There are a number of ways to do this, photoshop, I understand has support for doing this and it’s possible under linux as well with the Gimp.
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Tech support tutorials made easy on linux….
One of the real frustrations with phone tech support is translating step by step what is needed to the person on the other end. I know it sounds easy, but in reality – what if they’ve got xyz theme for their menuing and it’s not there, what if… oh you know – they’ve just got something in a different place than you expect it. The person on the other end usually has to be the eyes and that, many times doesn’t work out great. That’s one reason that I’ve worked to start doing the remote tech support because that way I can BE AT the machine and what seems like an eternity on the phone can actually become a short and quick resolution. Anyway – Newsforge today detailed a way to capture videos of actions on screen in a “how-to” format under linux with ScreenKast and share the how-to video online with captorials.com